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Bring it on, serpentine woman.

Dr. Finis released a grumble too similar to a growl. Her withered fingertips drifted with ear-splitting friction over the desk to meet mine—which at some point had gripped the edge. Her touch was stiffer than a corpse’s, so cold it froze my blood. But I didn’t dare draw away.

“Is that what you wanted to hear?” I remained unflinching, despite every neuron in my brain firing at me to run.

“Where is your fear, River?” Her jaw jolted open and shut as if it were detached from her body and someone else pulled a string to move it.

“It’s not…” A foul stench clogged my thoughts before I could finish. I’d gagged on that smell once before—burnt rubber and teratorn guts. My head swiveled around the room, but I didn’t know what I was searching for. An answer? A distraction? A demon? The air stung my widened eyes as I turned back to the doctor, her skin more waxy, saggy than it had just been when I was looking at her a second ago. It seemed to melt off her bones.

I tried to pull my hands away, but she gripped them even tighter.

The realization I’d been ignoring from the moment I walked in reared its ugly head. This woman wasn’t human. She was something different. Supernatural. Evil.

“Where are they, River?” The question bellowed from deep inside her throat. It rattled the picture frames, the pens in their holder, but I wouldn’t let it rattle me.

An unsettling calm, like what came before a storm, brewed beneath my skin—as the clip of a memory, one that’d been buried so deep it didn’t seem real, overtook me.

I’d barely gotten my head above water when my mom ricocheted back into the rip current she’d saved me from. The waves swept around her like limbs, dragging her farther, deeper—until every part of her was submerged except her angled chin and contorted, gaping mouth. But she’d told me to stay, so…I did. Then the sky parted as if Death himself had come to snatch her, in a beam of wind and shadow and rain. Shafts of light broke through the nearby clouds, casting a silhouette within the storm—human shaped, but with billowy arches jutting out of their back. Wings. The shock and icy cold froze me to the bone, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the figure; it looked so much like her.

I shook my head. She was sinking. Right in front of me. It couldn’t have been her.

My mom had died because I just sat there, treading water. Anger launched me out of the memory like a slingshot.

On a tight inhale, I met Dr. Finis’s hungry, death-black stare. The fury remained, but I schooled my features as the energy that had started building prickled and parted into each finger and toe, to the very core of me. Power, unchecked and instinctive and so similar to the rush I got when surfing, pressed against my body, searching for a way out. I thought it might shoot out of me.

Her death grip tightened, scaly fingers coiling around mine, demanding an answer. I didn’t know where the Voices were. But I did know one thing as I thrust my hands forward, trying to throw her off me. “They’re not HERE!”

I knew this feeling. It welled up inside of me when I reached my breaking point; not just here, or with the teratorn, but throughout my life. I just hadn’t known what to do with it—magic. Source. It beaded my senses like the sweat lining my upper lip as years of heartbreak, hate, and humility gushed out of me. It pulsed outwards in a gilded wave, not just from my fingertips, but every pore that dotted my skin. The pressure in my skull throbbed, one painful pulse away from utterly wrecking me—but I couldn’t stop, not even as it twisted each nerve, and felt like it might tear my limbs from my body.

The curtains whipped to the sides and the day flooded in, momentarily blinding me. The magic ceased as the backs of my hands shot to my brows, shielding me from the brightness and the thuds and shrieks that came from somewhere in the room, but I couldn’t see.

I shot to my feet, tripping over my chair as I scrambled to get away from the area until the light settled—which it didn’t.

My vision adjusted, but it was just as bright. I locked eyes with Dr. Finis, still behind the desk, but she wasn’t sitting; she wasn’t even standing. She was dangling, pinned to the bookcase like a wall mount by a dozen brilliant gold threads that seemed to splinter off from the sunbeams. They wove through the air, from her to the windows, swaying in an absent breeze. She clawed at the light, but it wrapped around her wrists, her ankles, her neck, her gaping mouth, translucent but strong as rope. Books fell off the shelves as she rammed her head back and tried to force the muzzle free.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t, as if I too were bound by the glistening strings.

Feathers black as a crow’s, torn and singed, wafted to my feet. One landed on my toe, the faint tickle enough for me to twitch in response, coaxing my body out of shock. They were everywhere, like someone had shredded a pillow, but didn’t have an obvious source. I collected one and stuffed it in the back pocket of my shorts, hoping it’d make it out of there intact.

Which meant I had to, as well.

The doctor angrily thrashed as light flooded her mouth, and more feathers erupted from behind her back. I didn’t have time to consider what that meant. The sunbeams were dimming, losing their grip. The golden threads shuddered and then, one by one, they started to snap. Which meant I needed to stop acting like a deer in headlights and get the hell out of there. As I turned to book it out of the room, a raspy voice starved of oxygen stopped me in my tracks.

“We will find you, River Harlow.” Dr. Finis gulped and gargled as if she were drowning, fighting off the golden gag. “This isn’t the end. This is only the beginning.”

My necklace singed my clavicle, the short stab of pain keeping me from spinning around to face her threats. I flung open the door and hustled down the hallway, not daring to look back to see if she pursued me.

Chapter 22

Ryder hopped out of his chair, dropping an out-of-date gossip magazine as I bolted past him in the waiting room. I felt him on my heels as he jogged to catch up to me. “What happened in there?”

Busting through the automatic doors, I didn’t let my focus drift to anything but what was ahead of me. “She humiliated me, threatened me, tried to destroy me.”

“Isn’t that what therapists do?” There was a lightness to his question, as if it were a joke, but I was not in the mood.

I shook my head, dispelling the image of Dr. Fairmore before it could cool my heated thoughts. No. She was just like the rest of them. “Yes,” I said coldly, my breaths getting faster even as my strides slowed. “But something else happened in there—” Struggling to get that last part out, I stopped in the middle of the garage, doubling over and gripping my knees. It felt like an invisible hand clutched my throat.

Ryder placed his palm on my curled spine. “River, are you okay?”